Fiduciary Parenting of Transgender Youth

This article aims to evaluate whether parents of minors who identify as transgender have moral duties to help their children achieve social or medical transition and whether they have moral permission to take a more oppositional posture and, if so, under what conditions. Very child-centred theories of parenting might recommend that children should get to make their own decisions without parental gatekeeping and very parent-centred theories of parenting might recommend that parental interests or values are appropriate to guide decision-making instead. A particular account of fiduciary parenting, the view developed and defended in this article, does not require that parents always accede to their children’s demands for gender transitions irrespective of where in the life-course children find themselves. However, parents have obligations stemming from their fiduciary roles to evaluate their children’s demands with careful deliberation, humility, conscientiousness, and sensitivity to dynamic change. In particular, children can require from their parents a decision procedure that properly orients parents toward children’s welfare rather than the parents’ own welfare and a decision procedure that also does not centre ‘irreversibility’ as a core anchoring mechanism. It is an essential moment to gain more clarity about how ‘first-responder’ parents should be managing demands from their children about their gender expressions.